Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism

By Katherine Lemons

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism.

Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501734786

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DIVORCING TRADITIONS

Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism

KATHERINE LEMONS

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

PART I. THE STATE

1. Regulating Kinship under Legal Pluralism

2. Muslim Divorce, Secularism’s Crucible

PART II. THE QAZI

3. Shari‘a Courts’ Family Values

4. The Converging Jurisprudence of Divorce

PART III. THE MUFTI

5. Talaq, Talaq, Talaq …

6. The Healing Jurist

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like all books, I imagine, this one has been shaped and sustained by many people, in ways small and large. My debts to friends and interlocutors in Delhi and Lucknow are deep, and I am especially grateful to the qazis, muftis, mahila panchayat leaders, and disputants who took the time to teach me some of what they know.

My interest in the ideas and problems I address here was sparked while I was at Berkeley. Lawrence Cohen has provided guidance, insight, and a model of capacious and creative intellectual life since I first met him. His support has been unwavering. Marianne Constable has been an unfailingly generous and careful reader since the beginning. Her vision for where this project could go exceeds what the book has accomplished; perhaps a work on the rhetoric of anthropology is yet to be written. Saba Mahmood’s fierce intellectual determination, commitment to the stakes of anthropological research, and uncompromising standards undergird the efforts of this book. All three have continued to support and nurture this project in the years since I left Berkeley, for which I am tremendously grateful. Barbara Metcalf generously read and commented on parts of the manuscript, and her insights have been influential.

At Berkeley, friends propelled my intellectual life. To the rhetoricians—Diana Anders, Nima Bassiri, Michelle Dizon, Alice Kim, Yannick Thiem, Andrew Weiner, Yves Winter, and Ben Young—thanks for teaching me so much. To the anthropologists (and their allies)—Michael Allan, Dace Dzenovska, Angie Heo, Cindy Huang, Lucinda Ramberg, Tahir Naqvi, and Pete Skafish—thanks for welcoming me into the discipline and helping me learn my way about.

My research in Delhi was made possible and enjoyable by people beyond my immediate circle of interlocutors. I thank Nisha Kirpalani, Harpreet Anand, and Sajida Khan and her family for helping with and sharing housing. Chitra Padhmanabhan and M. K. Venu have made Delhi a home. In their apartment I have been questioned and encouraged by many, among them Hartosh Bal, Nonika Datta, Basharat Peer, Sarim Naved, and Ananya Vajpeyi. Among the academic friends in Delhi who have read and discussed parts of this book with me are Ulka Anjaria, Jon Anjaria, Leo Coleman, Shalini Grover, Deepak Mehta, and Rajni Palriwala each of whom has contributed to my thinking. At Jamia Millia Islamia, I was welcomed by Dr. Kahkashan Danyal, Dr. Akhtarul Wasey, and Qazi Obaid ur Rehman Hashmi. Dr. Hashmi’s family—Mehnaz Obaid, Sana, Saba, and Amaan—warmly welcomed me into their home.

A number of friends and colleagues have read chapters over the past few years, helping give shape to my ideas. They include Gretchen Bakke, Rachel Berger, Dace Dzenovska, Saida Hodzic, Sarah Pinto, Lucinda Ramberg, and Theresa Ventura. I have, furthermore, been lucky to have received robust and probing comments in a number of workshops. I thank the following groups and participants for their generous but rigorous engagement: Rupa Viswanath, Nathanial Roberts, and Srirupa Roy, as well as the other members of CeMIS in Göttingen, Germany; Mayanthi Fernando, Joan Scott, Michael Allan, Judith Surkis, and Saba Mahmood; Tamir Moustafa, Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Peletz, and the other participants at the workshop on Islamic Law at Simon Fraser University; Arzoo Osanloo, Nada Moumtaz, Aria Nakissa, and the other participants in the workshop on Islam and Forgiveness at the University of Washington; Leslie Orr and the working group on Religion and Women’s Studies at Concordia University; the members of the Montreal working group on religion and media—Hillary Kaell, Setrag Manoukian, Kristin Norget, Armando Salvatore, and Jeremy Stolow; and those who asked astute questions at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Anthropology. For their interest in and ongoing discussions about this material I thank Srimati Basu, John Bowen, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Jeff Redding, Mengia Hong Tschalär, Gopika Solanki, and Sylvia Vatuk.

In Montreal, where I wrote most of this book, I am lucky to be surrounded by colleagues and friends who have offered critical guidance and feedback. My colleagues in the anthropology department at McGill University—Diana Allan, Nicole Couture, John Galaty, Sandra Hyde, Eduardo Kohn, Setrag Manoukian, Ron Niezen, Kristin Norget, Tobias Rees, Colin Scott, Lisa Stevenson, and Ismael Vaccaro—have been collegial and supportive, making this a hospitable environment in which to think, write, and collaborate. Beyond the anthropology department, Poulami Roychoudhury and Narendra Subramanian have both been astute interlocutors. I am grateful to the students in my 2017 seminar on secularism for their energetic engagement with much of the material that informs this book. Catherine Larouche has provided invaluable help with the detail work required for publication. My undergraduate research assistants Myra Sivaloganathan and Samar Nisar worked diligently with me on various court records.

I am humbled to have received five insightful anonymous reviews on the manuscript, and I thank these scholars for their seriousness and generosity. I hope the revisions reflect my appreciation for what they have done to make this a better book. I thank Jim Lance for his enthusiasm about the manuscript and his help with the publishing process. Thanks to Matthew Wyman-McCarthy for a careful final edit and to Zahra Sabri for expert transliteration. The research and writing of this book have been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC), and McGill’s internal Social Science and Humanities Research Council Award.

I owe Dace Dzenovska a special debt of gratitude. She has been discussing this project with me for over a decade; her incisive questions reflect her intellectual generosity and her abiding commitment to argument. She has, through it all, been an unwavering friend. Finally, I thank my kin. Yves Winter’s scholarly acumen has both inspired and challenged me; his endless energy for discussion and debate, his unflagging belief in the project, and his companionship have been both a source of energy and a ballast. I appreciate the aplomb with which my children, Anouk and Nasim, have taken my absences for research and writing. The indomitable Anouk has brought me laughter and joy and new perspectives on our shared world; Nasim’s unfettered love for all of us has made our lives richer. I thank my parents, Daniel and Mary Lemons, for support of every kind, from interest in my research to childcare. Their determination and energy inspire awe, and their unwavering love humility. I rely on my brother, Peter, for his insights and for his ability to make me laugh. My sister, Sarah, has taught me much about determination. My parents-in-law, André and Karin Winter, have always stood behind me; Ada Winter’s carefully-timed visits enabled me to do follow-up research in Delhi. Jaron Winter could not be a more dedicated brother-in-law. Without the professional and loving labors of my children’s daycare teachers, I would not have been able to complete this project.

Several sections are reproduced from past publications, with permission from the publisher. Parts of chapter 1 have appeared in The Politics of Livability: Tutoring Kinship in a New Delhi Women’s Arbitration Center, Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(2): 244–260. Some of the research presented in chapter 4 has been published in September 2018 as Sharia Courts and Muslim Personal Law in India: Intersecting Legal Regimes, Law and Society Review 52(3). Finally, a different version of the second half of chapter 5 has been published as Paying for Kinship: Muslim Divorce and the Privatization of Insecurity, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 7(2): 197–218.

PART I

The State

Chapter 1

REGULATING KINSHIP UNDER LEGAL PLURALISM

Salam ‘alaikum, the woman quietly uttered, subtly bowing her head and raising her right arm in a deferential greeting. The woman entered the office of the qazi (judge) hesitantly, seemingly unsure what to do. I was sitting with Qazi Kamal in his south Delhi office that morning in the late spring of 2006, chatting with him as he read the stack of Urdu-language newspapers that his peon (assistant) had delivered. The qazi and I both looked up when the woman entered, and he asked what she needed. The woman, who wore a tired black burqa indicating her membership in a pious but poor family, respectfully asked the qazi to open a divorce case on behalf of her daughter, whose husband was allegedly abusing her. The qazi took out a form with the title, printed in Urdu at the top of the page, Darkhwast Dene Ka Form (complaint form). The form noted the name of this dar ul-qaza (shari‘a court) they were currently in, which it called, parenthetically, a shari‘a panchayat. The form also provided space for a case number, the name of the mudda‘i (complainant) and mudda‘a-alaih (respondent), their parents (wald-i or bint-i), and their full addresses, including dak-khana (post office), thana (police station), and zila‘ (district). The last printed line of the header read, Guzarish hai kih … (The plea is …), a phrase in Persianate Urdu unused in everyday conversation, followed by an expansive blank page.

The woman looked at the form and told the qazi she was unable to read or write. The qazi replied that she should take it with her, have someone else write down the complaint, and return with the completed form. The woman silently took the form, and, muttering a khuda hafiz (God be with you), turned and left the room. She returned a week later with her daughter and handed the qazi the form completed in the devanagari script in which Hindi is written. The qazi impatiently returned the form to her, insistent that it must be presented to him in the nasta‘liq script, in Urdu, the language in which Muslim clergy in India are trained and in which they write. Qazi Kamal, like most of the other clerics I met during my fieldwork in Delhi, could also read Hindi and English, but neither was the language of Muslim scholarship and adjudication. Urdu literacy is one of the things that marks experts in Islamic legal practice as distinct from legal experts in the Indian state courts, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. Case files in the dar ul-qaza are written in a neat hand by the qazi himself, who takes down witness testimonies, transcribes cross-examinations and statements of fact dictated by the parties to the cases, and, finally, records his faisalahs (judgments).

Unlike the other dar ul-qaza in which I conducted fieldwork, this one was not located in a madrasa (a school that offers instruction in Islamic religious and legal knowledge). Yet the qazi insisted that the complainant find someone in the neighborhood to fill out her form. The request reflected the dar ul-qaza’s geographical and demographic location. It was located in a neighborhood dense with Muslim institutions. On the paved road not far from the office, the renowned Jamia Milla Islamia University was always full of students, some of whom read and write Urdu; down the pitted unpaved alleys of the office’s immediate neighborhood, the Islamic Fiqh Academy buzzed with students and with clerics writing fatwas; a bit further down the road, in what was technically another neighborhood, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s head campus housed students and teachers of Islamiyat, or Islamic sciences. Though the neighborhood was crowded, with its infrastructure—from roads to electrical service—in poor repair, it was home to professors from Jamia Milla Islamia, Islamic legal scholars, and Muslims from across the class spectrum, including middle-class professionals and working poor, like the woman seeking to help her daughter. The composition of the neighborhood reflects the pattern of Muslim segregation from non-Muslims in Delhi: as in other predominantly Muslim neighbors, Muslims of all social classes mix together in this one. Sometimes such class mixing is an effect of family histories, with well-off Muslims living in ancestral homes. But it also reflects the difficulty Muslims have finding homes in non-Muslim neighborhoods because of anti-Muslim prejudice.

The morning the woman left the dar ul-qaza for the second time, she appeared disheartened and frustrated that the qazi would neither read her form completed in Hindi nor examine her daughter’s bruises, the latter of which was material evidence of ongoing spousal abuse. For this woman, providing written material in Urdu appeared to have been too steep a condition for entry to the dar ul-qaza. Or, perhaps, she found that the qazi’s gruff manner did not bode well for her daughter’s case. Either way, she and her daughter did not return to have a divorce adjudicated. However, even though this woman did not end up initiating a case in this dar ul-qaza, her decision to approach the qazi is revealing. It indicates that family disputes among Indian Muslims can be dealt with by consulting a religious legal scholar rather than by bringing a case in the state courts or registering a complaint with the police. The woman’s apparent hesitation to approach even the qazi also reflects the difficulty people have taking marital disputes to an outside party, as most family matters are dealt with within and among family units. Her decision to come to the dar ul-qaza, prior to seeking recourse elsewhere, suggests that, for some, a local religious legal expert is easier to approach than a state institution. This is in part because the qazi’s office is accessible—it is local, the consultation is free (while filing a case costs very little), and it lacks both the chaos and the layers of intermediaries between disputants and judges characteristic of the district courts (see Mody 2008). In contrast to these forums, the dar ul-qaza appears to be informal. Yet the qazi’s insistence that the complaint form be filled out properly tells a different story. It indicates that this is in fact not an informal setting, but rather a deeply procedure-oriented legal forum whose protocols, although different from those of the state courts, are nonetheless formal. The qazi is qualified to adjudicate cases because of his Islamic legal knowledge and the dar ul-qaza constitutes a domain of expertise.

Dar ul-qazas operate according to Islamic traditions of adjudication and appear in this anecdote to occupy a space beyond and untouched by the state courts. Yet it is my contention throughout this book that dar ul-qazas, like other nonstate forums I analyze, are both separate from and entangled with state legal adjudication forums and jurisprudential traditions. In the case of the qazi, this means that although he did adjudicate according to Islamic legal norms and traditions, and these are distinct from the state courts’ norms, procedures, and laws, his work of adjudication was part of, not separate from, a broader legal system that includes state courts. While I do not know where the woman who approached the dar ul-qaza went next, my research and that of other scholars indicates that she is likely to have approached any number of other forums: the local Women’s Cell—a police station where women file domestic violence complaints; a mahila panchayat (women’s council) where local women adjudicate family disputes; a mahalla (neighborhood) committee; any number of Muslim women’s organizations; or even the family courts. The dar ul-qaza is set apart from these other forums by its religious legal character while simultaneously operating in dynamic relation to them.

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in the secular state of India, where Muslims are a significant minority—numerically, legally, and politically—and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. I conducted the research for this book between 2006 and 2013 in four different types of nonstate dispute adjudication forums: two dar ul-qazas, a dar ul-ifta (fatwa-giving office), a Sufi healing practice, and a mahila panchayat (women’s council). None of these institutions are part of the state’s formal legal system, which means that the decisions, judgments, and advice they offer are not legally binding from the perspective of the state. Nor are they upheld by its enforcement mechanisms.

The forums I study are best understood, more specifically, as practices of shari‘a rather than as practices of state law. Shari‘a here should be understood as being broader than law: it is a guide for how one ought to live as a Muslim, which involves abiding by Islamic legal precepts. As such, it is a form of moral, ethical, and legal guidance that all Muslims seek to follow. Each institution has a different aim and procedure that cannot, therefore, be conflated. Dar ul-qazas are adversarial settings that gather testimonial evidence, mediate between parties, and culminate in a faisalah, considered binding on the parties and not by the state but in the eyes of God. Dar ul-iftas are forums where lay Muslims seek authoritative advice from a learned mufti (jurist). Fatwas are not binding, according to Islamic legal traditions and the state; it is up to the parties involved to decide whether to follow the advice they receive. The spiritual healing practice is controversial among Muslims, but as a popular modality of adjudicating disputes and guiding Muslims into better relationships, it too, can be understood as a practice of shari‘a. The mahila panchayat is, on the other hand, led by lay Muslim women who make their own efforts at teaching women to deal with marital conflict. It is most tenuously connected to the variety of practices easily recognizable as shari‘at and is, yet, part of the Islamic tradition in that the adjudicators, who are Muslim, draw on the sources of the Islamic tradition (the Quran and the Hadith) to help disputants comport themselves better in their marriages as Muslims.¹

Divorcing Traditions argues that together these institutions animate a legal landscape that is plural, and that together they make up the system of secularism in India. Although the outcomes of the processes in these forums are not considered binding by state courts, the forums themselves have been recognized, variously, by the Supreme Court of India, district court judges, the Delhi Commission for Women (a local government agency), and an array of judgments at every level of the Indian judiciary. One effort of this book is to examine where, how, and with what effects the state recognizes these forums. The book’s overarching argument is that marital dispute adjudication in these Islamic legal forums is central rather than peripheral both to Indian legal pluralism and to Indian secularism.

By secularism, I do not refer to the separation of church and state, or the promotion of religious freedom in private coupled with the curtailment of religious practices in public. Instead, I understand secularism to be an ongoing project that aims to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. Secularism is what Hussein Agrama (2012) has called a questioning power: a demand to assert where a line ought to be drawn between religion and politics. A secular state is, therefore, always secularizing: it is engaged in a process that is never complete, but instead always fails in its efforts to separate religion from politics. The more the state attempts to separate religion from politics, the more intensely it intervenes in and regulates religion, thereby undermining the separation it sets out to secure. The question raised by the study of secularism, then, is where this process of perpetual intervention takes place. My argument is that, in India, one of its principle locations is the adjudication of Muslim divorce.

Muslim divorce proceedings reveal the labor required to separate an ostensibly private sphere of family, home, and religion from an ostensibly public sphere of politics and exchange. During divorce proceedings, disputants demonstrate that marriage is as much a space of exchange and of jockeying for resources as it is the domain of care, intimacy, and affection. The separation of family, home, and religion from politics and exchange does not, therefore, precede adjudication, but rather is one of its key outcomes. This is largely because Islamic legal forums limit their jurisdiction to matters that fall within the purview of religious authority granted by the state legal system. This compartmentalization has two consequences, both of which I demonstrate throughout the book. First, kinship is central to secular governance. Second, it is not only or even primarily the secular state that carries out the labors of separating these spheres, but religious legal institutions that operate beyond its purview.

Personal Law and the Religious Family

That divorce is central to secular governance and to debates about secularism in contemporary India is in part a result of the country’s colonial and postcolonial legal histories, which linked religious regulation to the regulation of kinship. The religious legal adjudication of kinship has the unexpected effect of generating the ostensibly separate domains of religion and law. The character of this separation is not analytical or conceptual; my research shows that it is a distinction instantiated both in state and nonstate religious legal practices and in the relations between them. The separation between religion and law is, in other words, an effect of Indian legal pluralism. A brief analysis of the eighteenth-century Hastings Declaration and judicial plan helps to clarify the present-day workings of legal pluralism in India, as this declaration established the separate but overlapping jurisdictions that continue to regulate matters pertaining to the family.

In India, as in other former British colonies and protectorates, marriage, divorce, adoption, succession, and inheritance disputes are adjudicated according to religious personal laws (Agnes 1999; Williams 2006).² Personal law, referred to in most such systems as personal status law, is law that applies to a person rather than to a territory and that regulates relationships accordingly (Sturman 2014, 7). Yüksel Sezgin has called postcolonial Indian personal law a unified semi-confessional system because state judges apply the religious personal laws of certain designated minorities—Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Parsis—to these groups and apply Hindu law to everyone else, including not only Hindus but also Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists (2013, 7).

In the colonial period, preexisting power relations both influenced the legal system and persisted in it. The rulers of Mughal India governed a religiously plural subject population with a legal system that adjudicated disputes based on the religious law of the parties involved (Eaton 1993; Metcalf 2002, 7; Yusuf 1965, 4, 8). As Eaton shows, under Mughal law, Muslim judges even enforced sanctions against Muslim coreligionists who had offended local Hindu norms (1993, 179–183). ‘Ulama (Islamic scholars) held prominent judicial positions during this period (Guenther 2003).

Religious legal adjudication of kinship by means of personal law was revised in the colonial period as part of an effort—riven with well-documented ironies—to govern Indians according to indigenous norms.³ The legal framework that would become personal law in independent India was formulated by Warren Hastings, then Governor-General of Bengal, as part of his judicial plan of 1772. Hastings presented the judicial plan as a clarification of the ancient constitution of India rather than as a new legal system, and he argued that it made only two interventions into existing jurisprudence: it clarified the distinction between criminal and civil law, and it moved the central courts to Calcutta (Travers 2007, 117). Robert Travers describes the plan as a rhetorical assertion of the exclusive rights of sovereignty intended to address the decentralized Mughal legal system, which seemed to British East India Company officials to be too unregulated (2007, 118). Coupled with the effort to centralize legal practice and thereby to assert Company sovereignty, the judicial plan aimed to enforce indigenous laws. Thus, the plan famously stated that with regard to "inheritance, marriage, cast [sic] and other religious usages, or institutions, the laws of the Koran with respect to the Mussalmans, and those of the Shasters with respect to the Hindoos, shall be invariably adhered to" (quoted in Travers 2007, 118–119). This brief sentence defines inheritance, marriage, and social status (caste) as religious institutions, as well as names the texts relevant to addressing and regulating religious matters for Hindus and Muslims.

The Hastings plan narrowed the scope of personal law relative to its Mughal precursor, specifying that it applied only to Hindus and Muslims. Sharafi suggests that Hastings did this for two reasons. The first is that British administrators assumed that other religious minorities—Jains, Jews, Armenian Christians, Buddhists, and Parsis—had no developed body of religious law and therefore did not elaborate separate personal laws for them (2014, 131–138).⁴ The second reason is that in Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, the British and the local landowners (zamindars) had previously debated which matters fell under whose jurisdiction. As a result of these debates, Hindus and Muslims were often exempt from appearing in British courts (Travers 2007, 119), and instead approached Hindu or Muslim religious leaders, respectively. Furthermore, at the time the Hastings Declaration was drafted, British administrators were involved in two distinct but simultaneous conversations with Hindu and Muslim leaders about how to govern their communities. They were not having similar conversations with leaders of other religious communities.

Conversations about the Hastings Declaration also lend insight into the specific shape of the domain that it designated as subject to religious authority. The Calcutta council that authored Hastings’s judicial plan of 1772 seems to have been influenced by Muhammad Reza Khan’s account of Mughal law administration, which the judicial plan explicitly sought to preserve (Travers 2007, 119–120). Khan, the na’ib diwan (deputy revenue officer) of Calcutta, argued that under Mughal law, civil matters—in particular inheritance, marriage, and other disputes, which can be determined by the express dictates of Mohammedan Religion—should be adjudicated by religious legal authorities (quoted in Travers 2007, 120). Hastings’s delineation of religious authority may, as Duncan Derrett argued, also have resulted from contemporary British legal distinction between ecclesiastical and temporal courts (1968, 233). Cohn attributes this decision to Hastings’s general view of India as a theocratic place; but while this point is well taken, it does not help to explain why he drew the boundaries of religious authority where he did (see Cohn 1996, 65). The judicial code Hastings introduced consolidated the sphere of religion by specifying that other areas, notably commercial disputes, fell within the jurisdiction of British arbitrators. The plan thereby simultaneously delineated areas to which religious legal authority would apply and pointed to certain domains to which it would not.

The Hastings Declaration appears to enunciate a primary link between religious texts and inheritance and marriage, thereby removing these relations from the purview of the state. However, from these first formulations, the claim to noninterference and the enactment of a private sphere of the religious family (Parashar and Dhanda 2008) activated new ways for the secular state to regulate religion by means of regulating kinship, now explicitly religiously marked. Even as religious authority was formally mapped onto the domain of kinship, religious legal experts were removed from state courts and religious legal precepts translated into English so that British judges could adjudicate personal law disputes (Kugle 2001). The effect of this was that British judges were given religious authority—the authority to adjudicate matters understood to be essentially religious. The Hastings Declaration had designated that the family would be regulated by religious laws and that its disputes would be adjudicated by religious legal experts whose decisions would be upheld by the British.⁵ As British judges took over for religious jurists, the religious content of disputes and/or the religious identities of parties was disarticulated from the religious identities and training of the adjudicator. By reconfiguring the relationship between religious legal matters and religious authorities—who were no longer recognized as legal authorities—religious personal law became official law while the scope of religion was reduced to include rituals and practices considered irrelevant to the